


Five Things Tony Stark has Learned about Clint Barton, and One Thing He’s Learned About Himself

by luthorienne



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 15:12:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1147474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luthorienne/pseuds/luthorienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony has given this a lot of thought...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things Tony Stark has Learned about Clint Barton, and One Thing He’s Learned About Himself

1\. Clint Barton is a lot smarter than Tony had assumed from just reading his file. He’s fluent in more than the six languages he acknowledges, and shrugs off any surprise that’s expressed by saying languages are easy for him. His memory is near-eidetic. He’s an amazing tactician and Tony knows Fury and a lot of the handlers seek out his input on mission design. He sees patterns where others don’t, and makes intuitive leaps when he’s analyzing data that he often has to explain for those who have to do it step-by-step. An ugly childhood screwed up Clint’s formal education to the nth degree, but over time, he’s been using his military benefits and SHIELD benefit programs to complete courses that would earn him an undergraduate degree in engineering, though he hasn’t told anyone about it, and Tony only found out when he was hacking SHIELD HR files. Clint is a skilled pilot: Tony has personally seen him do things with an aircraft that Tony knows are impossible. Clint is a voracious reader, too, and his knowledge of art and literature is broad enough to hold his own in a discussion with Pepper, who is one of the smartest people Tony’s ever met outside his own mirror. It drives Tony nuts when people underestimate Clint, but Clint mostly just seems to find it amusing. It took Tony a long time to realize Clint uses those assumptions to his advantage.

2\. Clint Barton is a solid block of muscle, scar tissue, bone and callous, and he should be as graceful as a brick. Yet he can move as silently and as quickly as Natasha, though he probably outweighs her by eighty pounds, and he’s as flexible as an eel from his acrobatic training in the circus. Pepper says he’s a great dancer. Clint claims to be able to hit a bullseye from the back of a galloping horse, and Tony doesn’t doubt it, though he’d like to see it sometime. Clint’s workout gear includes a ballet barre with full-length mirror, and a pretty elaborate gymnastics setup, which Tony has seen him use. Tony has watched Clint walk a tightrope, surf at the beach below the Malibu house, and levitate to the rafters on a rope. If Clint is physically clumsy or awkward, you can be sure he’s injured, sick, or very, very tired. 

3\. Clint Barton is a tough guy. Only a very tough guy could have survived Clint’s childhood and his upbringing. On missions, he puts his personal safety far down the list of priorities, and he is notorious for ducking out on medical treatment when a mission is over. Tony was once taken captive with him in a situation where their captors tried to use Clint as a lever to force Tony to build a weapon for them. Clint was adamant that Tony must refuse to cooperate, no matter what happened. Tony is still sickened by what was done to him, but until Clint lost consciousness, he remained stoic and smartmouthed, and at the end of the ordeal, he seemed more concerned over the psychological damage to Tony than about his own injuries. A lifetime of very rough-and-tumble relationships, including his time in the military and at SHIELD, has made Clint pretty resilient emotionally, too. Tony has seen him trading snark toe-to-toe, grinning insouciantly and flipping someone the bird long after Tony himself would have been throwing punches. And yet, for all that, Clint is surprisingly shy and sometimes startlingly, heartbreakingly vulnerable. Tony is amazed at himself for not at first seeing Clint’s indomitable snark for what it is: a suit of armour no less obvious than Iron Man’s, for anyone who cares enough to look.

4\. Clint Barton has amazing eyes, and Tony means that in all senses of the word. His distance vision is remarkable. If he is using a scope on a firearm, his quarry is more than a thousand yards distant, and if he needs a scope for a bow-shot, the target is out of range even of Clint’s recurve. Almost more than his distance vision, though, the colour of Clint’s eyes amazes Tony: they’re changeable, varying from icy silver-grey to a deep, liquid blue-green, depending on his mood, the ambient light, and what he’s wearing. He has what Tony’s mother used to call ‘bedroom eyes’: sleepy, thickly-fringed with long, dark lashes – and then, suddenly, his gaze will turn needle-sharp. The idea of Clint wearing corrective glasses was unthinkable until Tony happened on him unexpectedly one day in the little workshop Tony had set aside for him near his own lab, where Clint was sitting at a jeweler’s bench, fletching arrows. Clint was wearing rimless reading glasses for the close, fine work of splitting the quills and fitting them into the carefully-scribed channels in the shafts. Clint is shy and self-conscious about the glasses, which make him look like a (very fit) history professor, but he’s realized now that the others won’t tease him about them, and now he can sometimes be found in the communal areas, folded into a ridiculously small corner of the sofa, reading a book with his glasses on.

5\. Clint Barton kills people for a living. The press likes to refer to him and Natasha as ‘covert operatives’, but the bald fact is, Clint is an assassin. Natasha is a spy, and there’s no doubt Clint has done that kind of work in the past, but Clint is the one they send in when someone needs to die. He can be ruthless and he doesn’t back down. Tony once watched Clint and Natasha sparring in a SHIELD workout room. Neither of them was holding back, and they gathered quite a crowd of awestruck and half-frightened agents, from the newest newbies to Fury himself. Natasha’s eyes were manic, or at least the one not swelling shut was; Clint was wearing a feral grin, blood on his teeth, when Coulson coolly stepped between them and informed them they were done. Tony had asked him later what would have happened if he hadn’t stepped in, and Coulson had just given him an unreadable glance and walked away. Tony was pretty sure nobody but Coulson – and maybe Nick Fury – could have got away with stepping between them. Yet Tony once caught Clint crying silently as he listened to a piece of music on his iPod, and once, when Tony buttonholed Clint for a talk, he chattered at him all the way down in the elevator to the street and then into the park a block away before he realized Clint was carrying a mouse out of the tower to let it go safely in the park. Clint had teased him fondly for being startled by the mouse (he was startled, that’s all, not frightened, just startled; anybody would be, really), and then, when Tony threatened to get traps, said lightly, “We should get a cat.” Which took Tony’s mind off the mouse and started him thinking about building robotic cats instead ( _no shedding; no fish breath; hold captured mice safely in belly region with water and mouse chow until daily removal to park; probably won’t claw furniture_ ), and maybe that’s what Clint had in mind.

6\. Tony Stark is a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, and on the whole, that’s been enough, most of his life, to get him whatever he’s wanted. And most of the things he’s wanted, most of his life, have been fairly easy to quantify, and almost all of them have been laughably easy to obtain. Lately, though, he’s wanted a pair of blue-green eyes with amber flecks, and an insouciant grin in the face of danger, and gentle hands that cradle a tiny life until it’s safe to let it go free. He wants an analytical mind and a lithe dancer’s body and a battered heart that still hopes. He wants to hold those things in his hands and cherish them safely and show them how rare and precious and brave they are. He wants that forever, and that frightens him, because he’s never really wanted anything forever before. Nothing he has, he thinks, will win him those things and he doesn’t know what he’ll have to do to get them. But he knows he’s going to try.

**Author's Note:**

> I think they'd be good together. Not to mention highly entertaining. And I really hope Tony builds those robotic cats.


End file.
